Gender Inequality in Education and Kinship Norms in India

Anu Rammohan and Patrick Vu

Feminist Economics, 2018, vol. 24, issue 1, 142-167

Abstract: Women’s schooling attainment in India continues to lag considerably behind that of men. This paper uses nationally representative district-level data from the 2007–8 District Level Household and Facility Survey (DLHS-3), Indicus Analytics, and the 2011–12 Indian Human Development Survey-II (IHDS-II) to examine the role of socioeconomic and cultural factors in influencing gender differentials in schooling. The results provide quantitative evidence of the role of different economic and sociocultural factors on gender disparities in education. The empirical results show that economic development is an important factor in narrowing gender gaps in education, with wealthier districts more likely to educate girls than poorer districts. However, the norm of patrilocal exogamy, where wives migrate to co-reside with their husband’s kin, is associated with worse outcomes for women’s schooling relative to men’s schooling; and, in keeping with anthropological research, gender-differentiated inequities in education are more pronounced in Northern India.

Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (30)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13545701.2017.1364399 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:femeco:v:24:y:2018:i:1:p:142-167

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2017.1364399

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().